Dealership

How Marian Goodman quietly changed the contemporary-art market.

“Serious,” the art dealer Marian Goodman said. I had asked her to guess how other people in the art world regarded her. Concentrating, she paused between phrases. “Responsible. A passionate advocate for my artists. Batting average pretty good. More wise than unwise.” We sat at a canal-side restaurant in Venice, just after sunset—living pleasurably goes with being a successful art dealer. I asked her, “How about ‘tough’?” She said, “I don’t agree.” Pause. “People always say that about women in the art world.” I pursued: “Shy?” “I don’t know. People say that.” (A colleague once remarked that Goodman is the only person he knows who backs away while saying “hello.”) She stands five feet high. Her often wary brown eyes peer out beneath dark, girlish curls. She has the softest of New York-accented voices. She appears to retreat even when delighted, ducking her head and grinning to herself. Her conspicuous self-effacement suits a line of work that rewards discretion. It combines with her prestige—Goodman may be the most respected contemporary dealer in New York, for her taste, standards, and loyalty to her artists—to generate a formidably enigmatic air. “Ah, the queen of us all!” the dealer Friedrich Petzel remarked when I told him that I was writing about her. A less enchanted peer, requesting anonymity, grumped that Goodman is “not collegial.” (Royalty is so standoffish.) What is Goodman’s realm, and what sets her high in it?

In popular culture, the gallery owner is a stock figure of slinky charlatanry, or worse. If a dealer makes the news, it’s usually for being accused of tax evasion, money laundering, estate tampering, or some other offense that, in an arcane cash business, may be temptingly easy to commit. When that happens, people savor the cynical rush of discovering garden-variety greed behind a pose of lofty, intimidating sophistication. But there’s no getting around the fact that refined sensibility—the real thing, with or without a garnish of pretensions—is indispensable to selling art. In this line, even crooks need taste. An art work is a unique, usually handmade physical object, worthless in itself, around which ideas propagate and dreams are spun. Its value isn’t only subjective; it is subjectivity incarnate and portable.

Art dealers operate in a way that is confusingly indirect. Other entrepreneurs of creative production visibly cash in at the point where consumption either occurs (movies, performances) or is made possible (books, recordings). Only art galleries provide a full experience of their goods, free, to a drop-in public that is only fractionally, if at all, a clientele. (Serious collectors don’t wait for shows to make their purchases; they might have bare walls if they did.) It’s not that gallery owners are unusually philanthropic. To have anything to sell, they must accommodate their artists’ will to glory by putting on shows, with advertising budgets, public openings, and perhaps glossy catalogues, with introductions by hired critics. Money changes hands out of sight, in negotiations that turn on the relative clout of the dealer and the collector. Buyers and prices paid are almost never announced. The standard dealer’s commission on sales—fifty per cent—reflects the complexity of a gallery’s services to its artists: agent and manager in one, publicist, archivist, sometimes assistant producer, and perhaps social director and lay psychotherapist. Dealers help to aim their artists’ ambition at obscure bull’s-eyes in the culture. Repeated hits earn a dealer a reputation for being a magus or a mountebank, depending on who’s talking.

Goodman opened the Marian Goodman Gallery on East Fifty-seventh Street in 1977. (In 1981, she moved it to its present quarters, at 24 West Fifty-seventh Street.) True to the fanatical secrecy of her tribe, Goodman won’t speak of revenues. “We do well,” is all she would tell me. Walter Robinson, an art-world veteran who edits the online Artnet Magazine, estimates Goodman’s annual gross to be in the low eight figures. (According to the Art Dealers Association of America, a trade group, fine art generates between five billion and ten billion dollars a year, worldwide.) Goodman handles leading foreign artists, including the painter Gerhard Richter, the photographer Thomas Struth, the sculptor Thomas Schütte, and the mixed-media documenter Lothar Baumgarten, of Germany; the sculptors Tony Cragg and Richard Deacon and the video artists Steve McQueen and Tacita Dean, of England; the installation-makers Christian Boltanski and Annette Messager, the filmmaker Chantal Ackerman, the site-specific painter Niele Toroni, and the digital animator Pierre Huyghe, of France; the Mexican aesthetic gamesman Gabriel Orozco; the sculptor and provocateur Maurizio Cattelan and the arte povera worthies Giuseppe Penone and Giovanni Anselmo, of Italy; the Canadian creator of staged light-box photographs Jeff Wall; the Irish maker of gnomic slide shows James Coleman; the Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra; and the South African film animator and puppeteer William Kentridge. Goodman represents Americans, too, including the sculptor Dan Graham and the conceptualists Lawrence Weiner and, since 1999, John Baldessari—taking the Californian master of photographic montage from the gallery of her oldest competitor, the estimable Ileana Sonnabend.

The Goodman is less prominent than the Pace-Wildenstein and Gagosian galleries, but its existence gives the art world rare jolts of self-esteem. Though bright and welcoming—with rest rooms that Weiner friskily labelled “We” (formerly “Them”) and “Us”—the place emanates integrity. It’s a palimpsestic effect of years of shows that, if they erred, did so on the side of high-minded rigor. The gallery occupies the entire fourth floor of its building. Two large rooms, at either end of a long corridor, are congenial to two-person shows or to munificent solos. (Richter always shows in both rooms.) Three or four times a year, on average, a window in the front room is popped out, and works that are too big for the freight elevator are winched up from the street—a costly, nail-biting operation that Goodman incurs by stubbornly refusing to join the nearly total exodus of leading New York galleries to the practicable former garages and warehouses of Chelsea. Goodman’s taste is firmly rooted in the late nineteen-sixties and the seventies, when strong Europeans, having assimilated the lessons of American Pop art and minimalism, began to erode the creative centrality of New York. That was the last era of idealistic avant-gardes, whose ethical cachet—disciplined contravention of established values—still overshadows contemporary art’s wandering present state. Goodman’s identification with that tradition gives her a pick of ambitious, lively newcomers who extend and refresh it, such as Cattelan, Orozco, and Dijkstra. Any artist’s first show at the Goodman is automatically a big deal.

Goodman began life in New York City as Marian Geller, the first child of an accountant and a schoolteacher. If she wasn’t exactly a red-diaper baby, she was roseate. Her parents raised money for the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War, and she summered at a camp in the Catskills that espoused socialist sentiments, folk music, and baseball. Goodman remains on the left—“a classic American liberal, in the best sense,” her friend the radical German theorist and critic Benjamin H. D. Buchloh says. “Her judgment is ultimately aesthetic, but she has a broad understanding of what a privileged existence allows and requires one to do. Her gallery has a certain subtle social horizon of responsibility.” Goodman’s upbringing gave her a sense of belonging to a principled minority and, with it, a lifelong “fear of mob opinion,” she said. She attended the Little Red Schoolhouse and Elisabeth Irwin High School. She was a star second baseman in high-school softball. “My friend was the shortstop,” she told me. “Our idea was to look very girlie-girlie and to play the game very well.” She added, in a tone of hard fact, “We were terrific.” Indeed, there is something of an infielder’s grounded equipoise about her, however dissimulated by the voluminous suits she wears by the designer Zoran. She graduated from Emerson College, in Boston, and planned to study journalism but was forestalled by marriage to William Goodman, a civil engineer. “It was before I grew up. I was twenty-one and had two kids right away.” (Her son, Michael, is an industrial photographer in New York; her daughter, Amy, is a herbalist in Vermont.) Andrew Goodman, a son of her husband’s brother, was one of the three civil-rights activists who were murdered in Mississippi in 1964. Goodman told me of Andrew’s funeral, at the Ethical Culture Society, “Outside, the street was full of people. They were singing ‘We Shall Overcome.’ “ At the memory, tears came to her eyes. She shook her head.

Marian Goodman’s father, Maurice Geller, had a consuming passion for modern art. (His father, a Hungarian immigrant, was an unsuccessful painter who died before Marian was born.) Maurice had studied engineering but became a C.P.A. during the Depression to support his mother, three younger siblings, and his own growing household. He hated accounting, according to Goodman. In their apartment on Central Park West at Eighty-fifth Street, he mounted “art shows”: posters and reproductions, cut from books and magazines, of Cézanne or van Gogh or another modern master, arrayed on the walls for the family’s instruction. “I thought my father was mad,” Goodman said. “But the way to spend time with him was to run after him to museums.” Geller befriended Milton Avery, the superb American follower of Matisse, and at one point owned forty of his paintings—and almost none by anyone else. Living in the same building as the Goodmans were Sidney and Hansi Janis, who founded the influential Sidney Janis Gallery, specializing in modern and naïve art. They owned the great jungle painting “The Dream,” by Henri Rousseau, which became a touchstone in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Goodman remembers playing out jungle fantasies in front of it, by the hour, in the Janises’ living room with their sons, Carroll and Conrad (the actor).

Starting in 1963, Goodman attended graduate school in art history at Columbia. She was the only woman in her class. “A teacher told me that I wasn’t the kind of person that museums and universities were looking for,” she said. She despised the classes: “Teachers with their backs turned to slides, droning on.” She said, “I almost quit because of the civil-rights movement—to do something socially useful, to go to law school. I wasn’t sure being an art historian was so useful.” Meanwhile, she was ignited by a studio course with an abstract painter named Peter Golfinopoulos—“a street guy, so alive. There was so much love there.” Golfinopoulos showed with Charles Egan, a dealer of Franz Kline and Josef Albers. Egan became a lasting inspiration to Goodman. “Charles was a W. C. Fields type. A great fan of James Joyce. He was obsessed with ‘Finnegans Wake.’ “ Goodman recounted a scene in which a major Chicago collector, whose wife had musical ambitions, expressed outrage at a show in Egan’s gallery of monochrome paintings by Robert Rauschenberg. Egan denounced the collector as a philistine. As the man beat a retreat, the impolitic dealer shouted after him, “And your wife is a lousy violinist!” Such remarks must gestate at times behind Goodman’s bashful mien. Coping with the amateur public is a trial to her, precisely because she lacks any armor of snobbery.

“As a gallerist, it is your unpleasant duty to be friendly to everyone,” Thomas Struth remarked to me from his studio in Düsseldorf. “Marian is polite, but somehow she always manages to hold her own ground.” (Struth said that when she first visited him, in 1989, “I made a test.” He handed her a stack of fifty of his photographs and asked her to select ten. “She looked slowly and picked the best.”) “She is one of the most powerful and influential dealers of the twentieth century,” the director of the Dia Art Foundation, Michael Govan, says. “Of all of them, she has the least publicly visible presence. She is shy externally, but she has very intense individual relationships with her artists. She has an incredible stable. All her artists are among the most respected in the world, though with some exceptions, like Richter, of course, they may not be the most commercially viable.” Goodman spends “three or four hours a day,” she said, chatting on the phone with her far-flung artists—who, Weiner told me, constitute a “clan” like those of no other gallery. Her professional hero is the late Leo Castelli, contemporary art’s king in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. “I knew him really well. I was moved by his love of art and generosity with artists. His ethical stature. His warmth. I think of other gallerists who did a brilliant job, but they aren’t my idols.”

Around 1962, Goodman organized a portfolio of cheap photo-offset prints by New York painters—Avery, Kline, Stuart Davis—as part of a fund drive for the now defunct Walden School, which her children attended. It went well. “I thought, Maybe I could do this for a living,” she said. She needed a job. Her marriage was tottering. It was the sixties. “It all looked like freedom to me.” While Goodman did not become actively feminist, she said, “I saw those doors opening and I wanted to walk through.” Living apart from her husband, she was threatened with eviction from her co-op for entertaining gentlemen callers. (That was the second of three apartments on Central Park West, where, but for a spell on Riverside Drive, she has spent her life. She moved to her present top-floor apartment in 1973.) In 1964, Goodman proposed a nonprofit publishing project to the Museum of Modern Art; she was turned down. Printmaking was burgeoning in the sixties, responding to a soaring market and to an aesthetic sizzle provided by Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and other innovative artists. In 1965—with five thousand dollars that she made by selling a Milton Avery painting her father had given her (he approved of the sale) and with partners including her friend Barbara Kulicke, the wife of the dominant frame-maker of the sixties, Robert Kulicke—she opened Multiples on Madison Avenue, near the Whitney Museum. Multiples published prints and manufactured editions of art objects, such as plastic abstractions by Barnett Newman and cloisonné pins by Roy Lichtenstein. For Goodman, prints had political appeal: art for the many. Her course was irreversible by the time disillusionment set in. “It turned out that the people who buy prints are the same people who buy everything else,” she said ruefully. She recalls her shock at discovering, in the late sixties, that the Lichtenstein pins that she was selling for twenty-five dollars apiece were fetching eight times that in Europe. Speculative frenzy was a new wrinkle in contemporary art. Goodman is convincing in her distaste for it, though she has certainly profited from price surges in the past decade, especially with Richter’s works.

In 1968—the year of her divorce and a time when “New York was so insular; for the critics, the sun rose and set on American art”—Goodman had an epiphany in West Germany, when she visited the international art show Documenta, in Kassel. She said, “Like a lot of people in New York, I swore that I would never set foot in Germany. I was offended by people who bought Volkswagens. When I got there, of course, I looked at the older generation and wondered about what they did in the war. But the younger people were very mature. They had to judge their parents and to make their own values. They got right into the business of life. They didn’t have the luxury of contemplating their navels.” She saw a filmed performance by the ravaged, charismatic ex-Luftwaffe pilot Joseph Beuys, “moving gigantic planks of wood around” in a way that, for her, evoked the burden of the past. “I thought it was wonderful, though I had a lot of doubts about Beuys.” Artists of a leftist bent whom she began to meet and venerate, especially the sly and acrid Belgian conceptualist Marcel Broodthaers, disparaged Beuys’s authoritarian and megalomaniacal tendencies. Strains of conservative nostalgia and anarchic animus were at war in Germanic culture and, eerily, within the souls of individual artists, such as Richter and Sigmar Polke, who together, in the early sixties, hatched the brilliant German variant of Pop art, which they dubbed “Capitalist Realism.” For years, Richter showed in New York with Sperone Westwater Fischer, a three-person partnership that included the serious-minded German dealer Konrad Fischer. After Fischer departed—partly in protest against a new emphasis on fashionable Italian neo-Expressionists like Enzo Cucchi and Sandro Chia—Richter showed jointly with that gallery and Goodman from 1985 until 1990. He then opted for Goodman.

After 1968, Goodman began frequenting art events in Europe. She had a success at the Basel Art Fair in 1970 with an edition of Andy Warhol’s “Mao” prints—candy-colored icons of the totalitarian sublime, which, for one reason or another, nearly everybody liked. But she got nowhere in New York with her enthusiasm for European avant-gardists. moma rejected Goodman again, when she tried to interest one of its curators in Broodthaers. The art market tumbled in the recession of the early seventies, and her Multiples partners fell away. In 1974, she found herself in business alone, working from her apartment. She stayed up nights, she said, trying to think of tasks for her sole assistant, a young, dauntingly efficient German woman. Goodman was at loose ends personally, “rehabilitating my life.” Her frustrated wish to promote Broodthaers was decisive. She started a gallery, which opened on a tragic note. Shortly before the inaugural Broodthaers show, the artist died of liver failure, at fifty-two. (Broodthaers’s twisty, cerebral art—including elegant installations of, say, common objects in vitrines, eighteenth-century engravings, ironic texts, and the odd palm tree, concerned with protocols and politics of exhibition—is still a hard sell in America.) Other early offerings of the gallery were shows of the piquant German abstract painter Blinky Palermo and the dandyish, esoteric American sculptor and performer James Lee Byars.

Goodman kept company in the seventies with a trial lawyer, who brought some lawyer friends to an opening where Byars held forth in a gilded tent. Goodman recalled, “James Lee shouted, ‘Hear the phi-to-infa!’—something about philosophy—‘and it will knock you down!’ Then he would jump up in the air and flop on the floor. He must have been black-and-blue the next day.” The lawyers politely thanked Goodman for the evening. “I think they were puzzled.” She smiled contentedly at the memory. I asked her if such culture shocks were frequent among her non-art-world friends and family. She said they were, and promised to provide anecdotes, but later she begged off. She said, “There are many funny stories, but I’ve realized that almost all of them are at someone’s expense. I don’t feel right about telling them.” Accordingly, she declined to talk about the most colorful contretemps in her gallery’s history, which, as luck would have it, unfolded in the public eye.

Goodman worked closely with Anselm Kiefer for seventeen years, starting soon after she met him, at the 1980 Venice Biennale. It was an auspicious relationship, for her and for contemporary art. Kiefer’s grand, darkly ironic works on mythic and political themes, including disasters of the Third Reich, revived painting’s long-dormant potency as a medium of historical imagination. Having started her gallery for Broodthaers, she moved it to a bigger space so that she could show Kiefer’s often colossal works. The arrangement began to sour after a huge, disastrous dinner party in Greenwich Village, in May, 1993. The gala was the reclusive German’s hubristic idea of a New York social début. His new companion (and present wife), Renate Graf, who had met him while working for Goodman, made the arrangements. Kiefer’s sense of timing—the art world was in a foul mood, beset by a crashing market and a hangover from the scene-making frenzy of the eighties—proved lamentable. Guests were kept waiting for what I recall as the better part of an hour, standing in a dark room. Then we were admitted to a murky industrial loft that was tricked out with candelabra and white veil scrims, with white sand on the floor. Mimes in whiteface, including drag queens dressed as brides, performed non-stop. The fare ran to recherché organ meats, such as bull testicles. “It’s funny,” the artist Sherrie Levine (who showed with Goodman for a time) mused aloud. “I always thought I could eat anything.” Did Kiefer’s departure from the gallery, a few years later, stem from his grumpiness at the fiasco? One persistent rumor has it that he was angered by Goodman’s lukewarm response to some new work by him. She said only, “We went in different directions.” Pause. “I admire him immensely.” Kiefer has since shown with Gagosian.

The Kiefer evening notwithstanding, Goodman is celebrated, among friends of the gallery, for the buffet dinners that she has hosted at her apartment after openings. For years, she did the cooking herself. Among her oldest and best friends is Diana Kennedy, the doyenne of Mexican cuisine for the English-speaking world. (On holiday with Kennedy in Chiapas, in 1994, she was awakened one morning by the furor that announced the Zapatista movement to the world.) Goodman travels often, almost always by herself, to take in shows, to cultivate relationships with curators and other art-world people of influence, and, particularly, to see her artists. Visiting them is “like tending a garden,” she said. I tagged along on a trip to Cologne last summer when she called on Gerhard Richter at his studio. They met in 1983, at the high tide of the neo-Expressionist craze, in which the astringent and brainy Richter did not figure. Having briefly shown European stars of the moment like Georg Baselitz and Markus Lupertz, Goodman decided that both her heart and art’s future belonged not with them but with Richter, who was still little regarded in America. He welcomed her overture, he told me, because of his dismay at the course of fashion: “New York was looking in the wrong direction!”

Richter later told me that, when Goodman visited him for the first time, “it was a hard forty minutes. I am not a good speaker, not an entertainer. Marian is the same. Each of us sat in front of the other and didn’t know what to talk about. At last I said I was sorry, I had to work. I was a little bit angry at myself, for being so stupid.” It took me a moment to register that he told the story in praise of Goodman. “I was impressed that she came alone. Other dealers come with another person or an entourage to support them.” He added, “Marian is a presence. She is wise. She has courage.” (He gave the last word its French pronunciation.) True to his account, he and Goodman talked little when I was with them, but their enjoyment of each other was palpable. They did a spot of business about a series of eight different-sized sheets of thick safety glass bracketed to the wall—works meant to be reflected on, in both senses. Dapper and gracious, Richter sketched and numbered them on a piece of paper. Some were already committed to a collection or an exhibition, and Richter would keep two. Two others were set aside for Goodman, if she wanted them. She did. She pointed to another pencilled oblong on the paper and said that she had a buyer for that work who would give it to a museum. “Poor museum!” Richter said. He showed us his new abstract paintings. The first was a large canvas bearing a uniform grid of small skeletal spheres—derived from an electron-microscope photograph of silicate—in fuzzy grisaille: a cold, dizzying picture with an optical vibration and almost an audible buzz. Three other paintings progressively effaced and warmed up the pattern with painterly and atmospheric effects. “It’s getting more free,” Goodman remarked. Richter nodded. We looked at the lovely, difficult works in relaxed silence.

A few days later, Goodman arrived in Venice to revisit the Biennale for a long look, undistracted by the mobs that had attended its opening. The show’s all but exclusive emphasis on young artists troubled her. “Group shows are better with a sense of context,” she said. “I realize that everybody is supposed to know the art of the last thirty-five years, but it’s important that it be seen. If you put together a show of artists from the sixties and seventies, they are all survivors. With young artists, who survives is still to be determined.” This led her into mild complaints about the present art world. “It’s always the same cycle, since the eighties. Young people get a great deal of attention. Those in mid-career have a harder time. When they are much older, they may be reëmbraced.” (This recalls F. Scott Fitzgerald’s lament that there are no second acts in American lives, with the addendum that there may be a third act if you persevere and have somebody to stand by you.) “I wish there were more sense of balance. The way the art world treats new art has nothing to do with the reality of the situation. I wish we could replace it with more long-term interest in the artist over the span of his life.” Among those artists who were highly praised at the Biennale was Gabriel Orozco, for his elaborate, haunting re-creation, in wood, of a rapturously modernistic concrete portico, designed by the architect Carlo Scarpa in 1952, which still stands, badly deteriorated, in a neglected garden of the Italian pavilion. The most highly praised young artist was the Albanian Anri Sala, represented by a lyrical documentary film on the mayor of Tirana, who, to raise public morale amidst economic devastation, had arranged for the city’s buildings to be painted in brilliant primary colors. Goodman plans to work with Sala.

Today, the Goodman Gallery employs seventeen people full-time in New York and four at a branch in Paris. Goodman scouts new talent, but cautiously, lest she disrupt the standards and tone that her regular artists set for the gallery. The artists themselves have influence when it comes to deciding who will or won’t join their crew; more than one candidate has been blackballed. She listens to advice. Her friend Benjamin Buchloh alerted her to Struth and Orozco, but she has rejected other of his recommendations. She agonizes when selecting an artist. She said, “The choice of whom to work with goes to one’s spiritual core. It starts with intuition, but it’s important to reflect on how deep a commitment one feels before one gets involved. One must be willing to keep showing an artist for fifteen or twenty years. The worst thing in the world is to grab someone before one is convinced. It’s so devastating if you lose interest.” Careful to a fault at times, Goodman regrets having passed up a chance at the Belgian painter Luc Tuymans in the early nineties, deciding that he was a pale epigone of Richter. She now agrees that Tuymans’s tenderly brushed meditations on banal imagery take aspects of Richter’s painting to a new plane.

Goodman could save money and gain vastly more visibility by relocating to Chelsea. She has looked into the possibility, she said, but, like some of her European artists, she is chary of that hive of spaces. (The bimonthly guide Chelseart lists more than two hundred galleries, over half of them clustered on four blocks.) “They all look alike. People forget which gallery they are in,” she said. A quarter-century ago, she was almost alone among top gallerists in shunning SoHo, whose boomtown ways repelled her. “I saw dealers running after artists, then throwing them out and going on to the next. I was afraid it was contagious.” Relatively isolated, her gallery is less a showplace than a base for managing artists’ careers. “The most exciting thing for me is working on museum shows,” she said. Helping the curators of such shows by facilitating arrangements with artists and collectors “makes me very happy.” She ticked off a number that are in the works: Cattelan in London, Baumgarten in Dallas, Huyghe in Fort Worth, Orozco at the Hirshhorn in Washington, Penone at the Pompidou, and Baldessari, Dijkstra, and Kentridge with touring shows in Europe. McQueen has been in Iraq, photographing, as the official artist of the Imperial War Museum. Goodman looked forward with relish to having massive sculptures by Cragg hoisted up from Fifty-seventh Street for a December opening (the show of abstractions, in bronze, marble, stainless steel, fibreglass and Kevlar, was an almost dauntingly majestic affair), to be followed by shows of Baumgarten, Kentridge, and Wall.

What would Goodman do if she weren’t dealing? “Maybe teaching art somewhere, maybe in Mexico,” she said. “But no. I wouldn’t really. I’m a fighter. I would go down with my ship.” Pause. “I hate endings. I will do absolutely anything to prevent them.” In truth, Goodman without her gallery is as hard to imagine as a sea captain in Wyoming. “Gallerist” is the word she prefers for herself; she dislikes “dealer.” What’s the difference? She couldn’t exactly say. Perhaps she, too, is spooked by the shadiness that clings to her profession. (On the subject of business ethics, I asked her about the practice of skirting sales taxes on cash transactions. “Never,” she said. Pause. “I don’t think dealers do that anymore.” I said I thought that some did. She said, “I like to sleep at night.”) But the French-sounding “gallerist” signals something else, as well: an old-fashioned cosmopolitan ethos, for which the Atlantic Ocean is a lake shared by aspirants to transnational culture. New York City used to symbolize that. It still does, chez Goodman. ♦

Peter Schjeldahl has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998 and is the magazine’s art critic.